Before Alex Cooper became Gen-Z’s Oprah and head of the multimillion-dollar Unwell Network, she was hosting her then nascent Call Her Daddy podcast on Barstool Sports, the media platform founded by Dave Portnoy. Portnoy, a former salesman, had turned Barstool Sports from a self-published sports-and-gambling paper – “the only newspaper in Boston written by the common man, for the common man” – into an online empire, a founding pillar of today’s manosphere.